Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Online Cheaters in Poker
prostoalex writes "MSNBC has a special report on discovering online cheats at AbsolutePoker.com. A Costa Rican company belonging to a Canadian tribe at first denied all the accusations of any cheating going on, but after Serge Ravitch made a scrupulous analysis of the games' events, the reputation of AbsolutePoker.com was at stake. A detailed log file provided investigators with necessary details: an employee and partial owner of the site was one of the players involved, and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially."
wow beaten by the copy and paste troll
how's that feel?
All online games are easy to fix but I think people who play online poker are crazy. The whole point of the game is making judgements about the cards people are holding from their behaviour. If you can't see them, or even be sure that they are members of your species, why would you play?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially.
</Understatement>
Is anyone surprised? Off-shore gambling sites have no real oversight whatsoever as far as I know (unless Vegas, et.al.). Of COURSE people are going to get ripped off. As much as gambling on the cards, people are gambling on the site itself - and in this case - the guilty parties were gambling that no one would notice. Gambling all the way around. This is just one of many reasons why the U.S. is just out and out foolish to continue banning on-line gaming, when instead, it could bring it to shore, charge gazillions for licenses, tax the proceeds (for both the house and the gamers), and as an added bonus, enact various certification and oversight requirements that would provide some measure of protection while allowing government to do what it does best - grow even larger.
This particular story has to do with a security hole in the computer software, but in general, my understanding of the logic of the game is that online poker is potentially the only way to get a guaranteed honest game with strangers. In a meatspace game with strangers, the problem that basically can't be solved is collusion. Player A and player B both walk into the casino, and pretend they don't know each other. In reality, they've arranged certain secret signals in advance, to be used in hands where the pot gets big. One signal might mean "I'm bluffing," and another might mean "I'm not bluffing." Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage. An online poker system, on the other hand, can at least potentially be set up so that A and B can't get themselves into the same game together -- you just have to have a large enough pool of users, and assign them randomly to games. The other reason I'd never play in a casino game is that the house's take is big enough that you're practically guaranteed to lose money in the long run, unless you somehow manage to get into games where your skills are extremely high in comparison to your competitors'.
Find free books.
The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat. If I simply call a friend who lives in another location and exchange information, how will you catch that? Many of the high stakes table only has 1 table so it's not hard to get on the same table. If you assume the cheaters are actually good players then it is also not necessary that you always play on the same table. Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage.
"...and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially."
Yeah, I find knowing the other players cards helps my game as well. Go figure...
True, true. ...the whole thing is shady from the get-go. Online gambling is already in a large grey area of international law.
Shit, if somebody absolutely had to gamble, then couldn't they do so at an analog casino(which would be a much more difficult to cheat)?
I guess its for people who cant make a poker face then. :)
...this is what happens when you make your data members public.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Jails are full of stupid people who thought they were actually smarter than everyone else.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"Making reads on people" is only a small part of the game. Sure it's an important part to make certain borderline decisions, but there are far more important considerations - hand selection, betting strategies, pot odds, etc...
Yes, playing online takes away non-verbal tells. But it also gives you ammo in the form of hand histories, betting patterns, etc. You can gain far more information about an opponent if you know how he's played in the past than you ever could off a potentially deceptive tell.
Also, if you're wondering why some people play online, it's because there's far more diversity of games - typical live poker rooms these days are just $1/$2 NL HoldEm fests, with very few other tables. Plus many players enjoy the faster rate of the game, and some even multitable, having numerous tables open at once. You can play *far* more hands per hour online than in a live game.
With that said, I do enjoy live poker more, and I would play it more often - if only it was legal and regulated in my state. Too bad I have to drive three hours to find the closest poker room.
In both online and offline poker, the biggest clues to your opponents are *not* facial or body language tells. Those are too easy to fake. The real clues are betting patterns and logic. Those are not only obvious online, they're easier to spot. Bots are actually fairly easy to beat, they can't use second order logic (playing your opponents tendencies, not just your cards)
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
from the article, it mentions that the cheater was so blatant at cheating because they had a personal vendetta to prove to the company about it's flawed security. Basically the cheater told the company that it's systems were vulnerable and they wouldn't listen, so he set out to prove a point to them. Only after basically being so blatant at cheating that people thought he was god, and complained umpteen times to Absolute Poker did they do anything about it.
Basically what this proves is that, there is no way a real cheater will be caught. A real cheater is not going to do things to draw attention to themselves, if they can gain a 100% edge by cheating, they won't press it to it's maximum, they'll only press it slightly so that they only have a 55% edge, time and compounding will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, and NO ONE will be the wiser.
...here is a snippet one of the really damning hand histories (the cheat is POTRIPPER):
...
POKERME420 - Posts small blind $150
JINXY_MONKEY - Posts big blind $300
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to AUTOSMOKE [7c 4h]
Dealt to OBV_DONK [Js 5h]
Dealt to POTR0AST [6h 4c]
Dealt to POTRIPPER [Ks Qd]
Dealt to POKERME420 [10d Qs]
Dealt to JINXY_MONKEY [Ah As]
Dealt to CLOVER777 [Kh Jd]
Dealt to SCARFACE_79 [7s 3h]
SCARFACE_79 - Folds
CLOVER777 - Calls $300
OBV_DONK - Folds
AUTOSMOKE - Folds
POTR0AST - Folds
POTRIPPER - Folds
POKERME420 - Raises $450 to $600
JINXY_MONKEY - Raises $1500 to $1800
CLOVER777 - Folds
POKERME420 - Calls $1200
*** FLOP *** [10h 10c 9s]
POKERME420 - Checks
JINXY_MONKEY - Bets $1800
POKERME420 - Calls $1800
*** TURN *** [10h 10c 9s] [5c]
He folds KQo unraised preflop ahead of AA when there was a grand total of ONE HAND in the whole collection he folded preflop where an opponent didn't have JJ or better. A few hands prior he raised 62o under the gun.
I guess if you are going to cheat, you are going to need to not be so obvious as to never fold _except_ when your opponents have something.
http://casinosmack.com/blog/the-absolute-poker-scandal/
The Absolute Poker Scandal
October 16th, 2007 5 Comments
Is AbsolutePoker.com rigged?
Either way, the company is in big trouble. What follows in this post is huge news in the world of online poker and online casinos.
Our story begins in 2003. Absolute Poker's software is in development and many test accounts are created to make sure the program is working correctly. One of these test accounts, known as account #363, can see the hole cards at any table. This test account can not be used to play in real money games, it is only used for development purposes to see that pots are distributed correctly. The id number of this account being #363 is important because this tells us that this was one of the first accounts ever opened in AbsolutePoker, making it very likely the person in control of this account is someone with intimate ties with the company (owner, founder, employee, programmer, shareholder, etc.)
Follow with me to the opening of Absolute Poker (AP). Four people in different parts of the United States open up accounts at Absolute Poker. These four individuals do not know each other. The names in question are Graycat, Steamroller, DoubleDrag, and Potripper. They play in Absolute Poker for a bit, but they don't do well and their accounts are not logged into for many months. These are actual and real players, they are not fake players, they do not know each other, and they are not cheaters.
Key moment in the development of Absolute Poker: a major software upgrade is in process in 2007. The company hires programmers from many areas, including Costa Rica. Our villain in this scandal comes across the test account #363 with hole card access. Visions of big money flash in front of his eyes as he envisions hacking his way to big casino cash. He hatches a plan.
He finds inactive accounts at Absolute Poker and changes the password to these accounts at the server level. He opens test account 363 at a separate computer which allows him to see all the hole cards at the table. He then gets family and friends to cash out his winnings to. The way he does this is after he gets a big amount of cash at the poker tables, he plays against his relatives and buddies and loses all his cash to them. DoubleDrag loses to Reymnaldo, Graycat loses to SupercardM55, and Steamroller and Potripper lose to other various friend and family controlled accounts.
September comes, and as the money piles up, so does the ego and greed. Other poker players make comments in chat that they suspect there is cheating and collusion involved. He logs in as DoubleDrag and then loses every hand intentionally in No-Limit in an attempt to cover up his scam as he senses other players may be on to him.
September 12th. A well-known online poker tournament player named Marco Johnson, who plays under the screen name CrazyMarco plays in a $1000 buy-in tournament at AbsolutePoker.com. Cheat account Potripper is also playing in this tournament. CrazyMarco loses a head-to-head battle with Potripper when Potripper and asks for the hand history of the final table.
September 17th. The four Absolute Poker accounts (Graycat, Steamroller, DoubleDrag, and Potripper) are suspended and frozen.
September 21st. AbsolutePoker sends CrazyMarco a huge Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file (10MB and a full 65,536 rows, which is limit in Excel for most current versions). The spreadsheet is too complicated and scrambled to look into, so he saves it and decides to analyze it later.
October 12th. An AbsolutePoker.com official statement is released with their official comments on the cheating rumors, gossip, controversy, and overall poker community outrage. The company has been made aware of the poker blogs, chatrooms, and online casino discussion forums that are talking about this situation and they state that they take these allegations "extremely seriously". They have "determined with reas
Here is my reservation with online poker - what if instead of a table of bots, you were playing a single bot holding 4 hands? The bot still doesn't have perfect information, but can now factor in all of the cards from all hands that it sees. For that matter, what keeps a human player from starting a 2nd account and playing two hands at the same table?
I write webapps for a living. I know how easy it would be to sneak in a back door, and so do many of you. I cannot believe that anyone with enough internet savvy to play online poker wouldn't be aware of this possibility.
Just.
Plain.
Stupid.
I guess that stupid people get what they deserve.
At a real casino the casino is ALWAYS going to be cheating you, online you at least have a chance.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
In a real casino, you don't play against the house in poker, you play against the other player. The casino takes a cut of the rake for providing the atmosphere, the table, and the dealer. As in onlone and "analog" play, it is in the casino's best interest to ensure fair play at a poker table. If players don't feel the play is fair, they'll go somewhere else, and if they go somewhere else, the other players will follow the action. As far as table games go, where you are playing against the house, why is it 'cheating" when the casino provides a game that statistically you are bound to lose, and yet you still play? Disclaimer, I work in the Casino indistry, but I also know better to play the games, because the odds aren't in my favor.
This "geek" claim may actually be false. The cheater's IP address was linked to a founder of Absolute, and now they are claiming that a disgruntled geek tried to frame the founder. Given that they have stonewalled and seemingly lied throughout the amateur investigation, I'd take the story with a grain of salt.
Now, maybe there's some sort of authentication system to make sure that none of the other players are shills or robots, in which case you seem to be claiming that there's no reason to cheat on dealing. I still don't think that's true. Now, you know a lot more about online poker rooms than I do, so maybe there are safeguards against this that you haven't mentioned, but, since you didn't mention them... You said that the room takes a percentage of the pot in each hand, so the obvious ways for them to make more money from the same game are to manipulate events to increase the number of hands played, and to increase the size of every pot. It's been mentioned again and again that the online poker sites have complete hand histories as if this is protection to the player against a crooked site. It seems to me that if you want to socially engineer someone to keep gambling past the point where they would normally stop, etc. having that kind of information to know how to manipulate them would be very useful. Armed with that kind of information, there should be ways to alter peoples hands to, for example, make them more likely to raise the stakes, increasing the size of the pot and therefore the size the "rake". The other thing that could be done by a crooked site is to cycle the winner on each hand, making sure that no-one ever ends up down by too much, that way people are likely to play more hands hoping to win back their money/win more money/do better than break even, whatever. Something like that is a win for the poker site since everyone more or less breaks even, but pays to the site for every hand and when they finally leave, they end up feeling like they were so very close to winnning big.
Frankly, now that I write this down, it doesn't seem that different than what casinos do legally. They're allowed to rig the games as long as the odds end up matching some particular agreed upon number. And, naturally, they skew things to keep people thinking like they're going to win big. The anecdotal person who wins big isn't really someone who "beat the odds" they're part of the casinos advertising. Frankly, the gambling industry in general makes me kind of sick.
Anyway, what I've speculated above is based on fairly poor knowledge of how online poker rooms work. If I'm wrong about how they could cheat the players, please tell me in what way I'm wrong and then I'll have learned something new.
Creating a bot that defeats weak players is trivial, ie: players that have no sense of the odds they will hit something and make decisions that you can prove to be wrong based on the mathematics of the cards. A computer could calculate perfect odds and only play on them. However, such a bot would lose agains even a mediocre player that uses deception in his hands, plays bluffs, and watches the computers betting patterns. It's not hard to spot mathematical play.
Creating a bot that plays like a poker pro would require a combination of programmed intelligence, mathematics, player statistics, and second-order logic. There is no 'algorithm' that plays good poker yet, that I know of. It's not trivial.
This AbsolutePoker.com approached my company about 6 months ago. They were inquiring if I could supply security monitoring for their online gambling. Their focus was strictly the client, client blocking and not their servers. After examining their state of affairs and our specialties, I declined. Obviously this was the correct choice. I assume by this report they wanted to ensure they were the only ones that could cheat. With attitudes like that, why am I not surprised to find them getting their 15 minutes of fame on slash dot. :)
And from what I understand there are tons of college kids that do just that. Get 4 guys with different ips and just voice chat. You'll rape everyone else at the table.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Exactly. Poker is not pure luck. You can sometimes bluff people out of a pot even though you have the worst hand, and you can also sucker people into thinking they have the best hand when you do. You can also lay down a losing hand. You're not stuck with playing a hand through to the end, and at any time you can decide to stay in or to get out (well, as long as it's your turn). There are many factors, which rely on a player making a choice. This is what makes it a game of skill.
A game of chance is when you have have nothing you can do to change the outcome. Slots, craps, roulette, those are games of chance.
And another game of chance is betting on games of skill -- since you're not involved in the outcome of the game, it's pure betting. However, betting on football, baseball, basketball, horse racing, etc... is all legal.
It seems quite hypocritical to call poker "gambling" or a "game of chance" and to make it illegal when there are very legal games of chance that are huge markets.
The US government should get their heads out of their asses, make online poker legal, and tax the revenue. Just like if I go to a poker tournament at a B&M casino and win $10,000 in a poker tournament and have it reported as earnings and taxed, the winnings (and losses) should be tracked and reported. It's a HUGE tax revenue for the government, since online poker is a billion dollar industry. They could also tax the earnings of any online poker establishments based in the US, since they would be a business, providing more money. I don't know about you, but I'd rather play online poker at a site based in the US. Because that way, I have a recourse in court if they do something wrong. Right now, any money I have locked away at a site in the Carribean -- it's quite hard to sue them to get my money back if they want to keep it.